Winterscape
by coffee shop poet
Summary: Following his failed attack on Jotunheim and the destruction of the bridge, Loki falls to Earth and enters into the care of a young, disillusioned nurse fighting to salvage her soul in a chaotic world. Loki/OC.
1. Pale Visitor

_A/N: I just came back from Thor and of course Loki was my favorite. I thought I'd try my hand at a story for him._

_Enjoy,  
>coffee shop poet.<em>

* * *

><p>He won't be able to move, to wake. Not for a while.<p>

She looks on him, studies the bruised planes of his face, the slack lips, the round unmoving eyes underneath the curtain of blackened socket, the pale mountains of cheeks that glisten as if with a snow-like pallor. He's like a portrait of a beautiful landscape, sloping, graceful, elegance in every feature. They have to rebuild the structure of him, back up from the shattered remains of what loveliness the car had destroyed. It'll be back in time; the wounds are not so severe. It's the head trauma that worries them.

But, somehow, she knows he'll pull through. It's a strange premonition, but she's not so sure she doesn't like it, doesn't want it to be true.

There had been something about him, something desperate, an air of tragedy in every line of sinew in his face. They rushed him down the hall, the man who brought him in shaking, blood on his hands and threading through his gray hair when he'd tried to wipe the nervousness out of his body by tearing it out against his hair. _He came outta nowhere. I-I didn't mean to, nurse. I didn't mean to I-I swear._

_I believe you, sir. Everything will be all right. _She pauses in the midst of running with the gurney and breaks away from the collective rush. Smiling, she imparts some warmth to him, whatever she could spare. _We'll take good care of him._

_Nurse, please. _He takes her hands into his, caressing the soft bones of them with the callused gloves of his palms. He pushes a crumpled paper into her grasp, the darkness in his expression almost wild with tremors and unspoken pleas. _Please. Promise me you'll let me know how he is. That you'll call me. My son, he was with me. I can't…I can't tell him that I was the reason a man died today. He's smart, nurse. He'll know if I lie. He'll know. Please. Promise me._

_Nurse! _A voice came from down the hall, loud and harsh against the quietness of their exchange. _We need your help down here!_

_Yes, doctor! _She replies, and the messenger nods, disappearing back through the sliding door. Briefly, the letters _ICU _flash before her eyes, branding into her conscious brain, reminding her of the emergency at hand.

_I promise. _She looks down at the paper, the numbers of a cell phone printed in messy, hasty scrawl on the broken lines; then, she closes her fingers over the trembling of his, calming the earthquakes of doubt coursing through his system. _You won't have to tell your son anything._

His mouth closes, breath silenced for a moment, and he nods his assent, releasing her from his vice grip. Feeling returns, circulating blood flooding the veins of her fingers. _Don't worry, sir. He's in good hands. _As a last means of comfort, she raises the paper still in her possession as she turns away from him. Wordlessly, she's telling him she won't forget, and he knows.

Now, it's late, and the rush of the life or death situation had crashed into an eerie afterbirth of the victorious hush. Only the cadenced beep indicating the slow, steady pace of a heartbeat pushing oxygen-filled blood through the still-functioning body filled the echoing white room.

Everything is white. The pressed sheets, the scratchy wool blanket bleached a bony blankness of color. Even the air feels sterile and monochrome, devoid of personality or human influence. Here, it's needles, it's saline drips, it's business. Save lives, only to spit them back out into the dangerous world that nearly took the very thing they strove so hard to salvage. It all seems a hopeless business to her, but if they don't do it, then who will take up a lost cause as bleak as theirs?

He can't hear her. He's deep underneath the woven tapestry of medicated dreams, morphine whispering to his system to feel no pain, but apathy of the nerves, and the doctor estimated he'd be lost to the world at least until the morning. Perfect time to clean him up, before he wakes, he'd said to her.

_You got the gentlest hand in the ward, Naomi. _He liked to assure her of her place in this unit, perhaps in this world. _You take good care of him, all right? _

_Yes, sir. _She'd said.

He'd gone on, though. He's a polite, caring kind of man, a rarity in their vastly indifferent species. It's about money and power and prestige with the rest of them.

But to him, it's about the people he gets to send home to families that would have been lost without the life he'd hoarded away from the probing skeleton-fingers of death. It's about them. Someday, perhaps, he will answer to the reaper for the souls he's stolen away from him, but for now, it's enough to keep going that he has a purpose in an aimless world.

_Soon as he wakes, we'll try to figure out where he came from. _He scratches something down on a clipboard, looking up at her, a reassuring hand on her shoulder to warm it, revive it, perhaps draw out the weariness from the rest of the body. _But not until he's ready._

_It's not my place to question, sir. I'll leave that to you. _

_How many hours have you been here? _He'd questioned, benevolence clear as a bell in his every natural movement.

_Twenty-four. _

_After you finish up with him, go home. You can check in on him tomorrow, when you return. Get some sleep. You need to save your strength so you can be strong for your patients._

The truth is, she doesn't want to go home. Not to the empty apartment, the coldness of her bare life outside of this hospital, the constant strive to find meaning within the four walls of her existence. She sits in diners at 3 am, air sticky with grease and throbbing with human life all around her, and all she can think of is…_what if I have to see one of them on a gurney, the blood pouring into my hands, fingers grasping me as I battle for their lives_.

It gets to the point where, finally, she's afraid to let herself be close enough to touch them and all she can think of is the blood and the pain and the prayers that she can feel in their skin. The potential is there. It's not worth the risk. She stays away, far away, where no one can find her in the anonymous skyline of crowds and clamor. It's safe here. It's safe.

She can feel the pain in his skin when she presses the sponge to the crust of red staining his pale, dreaming face. It thrums through her like a livewire. Not just the physical hurt, the tsunami waves of the ache they're fighting against, but the pangs of the heart too. She can't pinpoint the emotion, but it's there, written in his face, and she's past the point of wondering what it might be.

Maybe, when she first started here, wide-eyed with the bloated innocence of a child, it would have been all she thought about. Where did he come from? What tragedies must have befallen him for him to end up here? Is he alone, does he have family? Are they searching for him? God, she would be able to feel their anguish too. She couldn't handle that.

His skin is deathly cold, perhaps why it's so pale as it holds no true warmth. It almost feels like…frostbite. Like the sensation you get in your appendages when they can no longer fight the bitterness of cold and begin to give in to surrender. It prickles, stings almost, and on first touch she pulls away, gasping inaudibly.

He doesn't move. She doesn't expect him to and yet at the same time, strangely, she almost does. Who _is _he and why is he so cold and why was he wandering around in the middle of the road in the dead of night? It's all she can bring herself to consider. What brought him here? Why he is in her care and under the supervision of vacant white coats who wield their medicine like the gods wield their otherworld powers. How can a human being be so cold?

Underneath the misleading guise of sleep, he grows restless, a noise of protest rumbling deep within him somewhere. Like thunder through his tendons, it rattles him to the core, and she can feel it with her nerve endings in such close proximity to his.

"You'll be all right," she whispers to him, putting her hot skin against his winter-cold cheek. He stills, the contact calming the turbulent emotion, and falls back into the pleasant black respite. She replaces her organic touch with the textured wetness of a towel. "They'll take good care of you. I promise."

She's almost afraid to clean him, fearful of disturbing the fragile frayed unconsciousness he's under. Reason breaks through the baseless apprehension.

_He needs to be cleaned up. The cuts could be infected. He won't wake. He's on a lot of morphine. If he hasn't been probed awake by all the needles they've stuck in him and all the hands on him then he certainly won't wake up for this._

As she works, she finds herself often drawn to his face, revisiting the sight of it over and over. There is something so elegant about the structure, even beneath the swollen tissue and the mismatched patches of black and blue and thick shells of dried blood. The arch of his nose regal, the roundness of his eyes almost reticent, wise, harboring a great and curious mind within the walls of his skull. His lips are small, as if they are often closed and hold behind them great unspoken thought, shrunken over time from little use. They are the kind of features you'd imagine in the face of a king. Or that of a god, if such beings existed.

But in the end, as she finishes her task, wiping the last of the blood from his body, all he is to her is another patient that she will never know. A name, perhaps, if they find out who he is. A number on his wristband that will go down in a permanent hospital record, another mark in the bedpost of the organized medical institution. In time, after he has gone, no one will remember him. No one will even think back to the regal nose or the curious mind, the curve of his eyes or the pursed look of his mouth. There will be no mark of his on this place. He will be but a ghost and he will, in the end, be gone.

The sponge ends up discarded in the waste bin, the water pail lying in wait on a silver, sterile tray behind her. His face is clear of the rusty color of spilled life; only the clear pale angles of his skin and the jutting bones beneath it are left behind. She touches his hand one last time.

"Goodnight. Sleep well," she murmurs, tilting her head to look at him. "I'll be back to check on you in the afternoon."

He doesn't answer. Not that she expected him to.


	2. Tales of Nocturnal Beasts

She can't sleep.

Often, she sifts through the promised land of slumber, senses the silk weaves of its cloudy surface at the blurred edge of consciousness, but never dips her hands beneath. They feel like water against the skin of her mind, her weary thoughts, and they seem to sigh against the touch, but keep to themselves their wants, their desires, for the colored moving images the night may render. Her eyed are closed, moonbeams pressing upon them, whispering stars breathing their silver-light breath against them. All the night is alive with the want to put her under, anesthetize her with black dreams, will her to fall under. But her body won't give. It won't relent, it won't surrender, and it won't fall.

Her eyes open. The clock burns green fire letters into her awareness. _3:16. _It's the most arbitrary of instances to look up from utter blackness and realize the world still turns, that time still passes her by. She sighs, releases from her being the last of her will to try for sleep in that one breath of finality, and she waits. Hands threaded through her hair, eyes half-lidded and heavy, elbows at their posts and flat against her knees. She waits for clarity, for a call, for anything but the heavy cricket symphony of restful nocturne that plays outside her window. It mocks her, christens her _insomniac _with their stiletto beating of wings, and then it's all silent again. Her eyes crack open. Lucidity blooms like a cold flower pushing against the brink of spring.

The light flickers on, steadily at first, growing more radiant as the bulb recovers from a startling awakening. Darkness creeps out of the room, and the moonbeams and the starlight seek shadows in the corners to hide within, their eyes still wide and glassy with intent to fill her head with anything less than sanity.

But she doesn't feel them, doesn't seen them, and the eyes of the night go on staring into the sleep-creased face, the weary silence that follows her every footstep throughout the room. She doesn't dress in her scrubs; she will only be sent home if they picked up on her even the slightest scent of stale coffee and bright resolution against death and sorrow. She's a master of the art of bedside manner, but handles poorly her own emotions, pitted, dried out driftwood in the sea of all this sadness and decay. They all worry for her – no relationships, no family, not even a dog to wring the loneliness out of her colorless life.

_Practically dead at 27. Pathetic, isn't it? Wasted her youth sitting next to corpses and holding their hands as they go._

She throws on her jacket, warding off the nosy chill of a late autumn night in New Mexico. Perhaps they wouldn't accept her as a dutiful nurse, her hands fisted with coffee and determination, but maybe – _just maybe, though her luck is painfully thin – _they might let her in as a wayward visitor, searching for answers, for solace, for distraction away from the sleeplessness of night.

Her mind reels back to the new one, the pale mountains and hills and shadow-carved valleys of angled features – the face that she had thought lovely and cold and cast in white wrought-iron sorrow.

* * *

><p>At the hospital, when she steps out onto the threshold of it, a familiarity sinks in like a kind knife. She can feel it, the sharpness of its purpose, how the double-edged sword existence it leads plunges into every heart scathed by its sterile white walls and humorless pale inhabitants. Her eyes slither shut against the feeling, letting it go in fully to the hilt, absorbing every inch of this place into her half-bleary cognizance. She doesn't even have to be awake to know her way through here, through the double doors, automatic, that swing open when you get too close.<p>

And the receptionist, her eyes grayed and baggy with sleep luggage and her mug half-full with rusty coffee too near old age to be any good. Sometimes, if she's awake enough, she'll say hello, to gauge you, to make sure you're really _all _here. Then she'll let you pass without another word, her job done, the gentle will of her concern forced upon the blank walking slate of another.

When her sight returns to her, she's standing in the waiting room, a few drowsy security guards and anxious loved ones worrying their hands and slumping into the backs of their chairs as if they're the only things keeping them from collapsing entirely. She can hear the private supplications to God guarded by the careful, hair-covered skull and the downward cast eyes - to be somewhere far off and quiet and free of all pangs of passion.

She can only imagine what they're feeling, what they're trying not to feel, trying not to hope for. All too often she's had to make them realize their worst fear for them, take their lives and tear them apart and hand them back the shattered pieces of what had once been hope and light and the innocence in the face of the specter of loss. She can never stay and help them. She always has to be pulled away, before she can utter even the most careless and casual _I'm sorry. _

She's come to avoid all human faces, all eyes brimming full with heart and breath and soul. And now, like all the times before when she could've said something, she passes them by. No consoling touch, no word, not even a look their way.

"Naomi?" She says, the half-conscious receptionist, and their gazes meet half-way. Hers seem to be overflowing with coffee and exhaustion. "What are you doing here?" she pauses, checks the upside down watch on her starved wrist. "Yeah, just what I thought. It's not your shift."

"Overseeing a patient. His PCP called me in – had to leave a little earlier than planned and wanted me to look in on him, check his vitals," Naomi explains, fingers of her brain deftly weaving the tendrils of a lie. "I'll be out of here in no time. Promise."

It's as if she spoke the safe word, the secret code, and all the invisible locks on the passageways into the empty halls peel back. She walks through them, underneath the steady buzzing hum of the lights. At the end of the hall, in the ICU ward, the man with the noble features lies in wait for the world to remember him, to rouse him from his dangerous sleep.

* * *

><p>The lights are low in his room, almost not there at all, and she could mistake any illumination as the moonbeams flooding the cracks in the blinds. And he's there, as cold and still as death himself. The groping hands of a shiver disturb the calm of her own body, waking it from its dormant station at his side. And she wonders how long it's been since she looked down at him, touched the segmented hollows of bone and flesh between his knuckles with the tips of her fingers, and sat down. Wonders, idly, how long it will be before the need to be here, to breathe in the same air as this strange and pale creature, is sucked away with the time and the stirring dawn outside the thin sliver glass of window.<p>

"What is so special about you," she murmurs aloud, tracing the face, imprisoning it to the shackles of her memory, where it will live on in solitude and never decay. There are so many faces, myriad expressions, ones that are coated thinly with dust from so many years passed, and others that are so stark and cruel and painful to perceive that they make her tear away in surprise, make her spirit writhe with the angry red river hurting of them. Even after all these years, so many of those memorized people haunt her, and she knows – yes there is no escaping – that this one will be one of them too.

When she looks up again, the minutes graying with the coming hours, it's there, that moment.

And it comes in the form of a new need – _cigarette._

* * *

><p>Out the back door, it's sort of like a haven. It smells of lipstick stained cigarette butts and old smoke and no one ventures out there unless it's to satisfy a need – for solitude, for fresh air, for a smoke, a talk, a moment away from it all. Here, it's a sanctuary designated for every kind of stilted confidence, riddled with the thick putrid smell of garbage drifting in from further down the alleyway.<p>

Naomi never truly needs any of the rest, just the smoking part is required of the asylum. Once outside, she digs into her purse, fingers outlining everything inside of it in a revealing form, and finds the rectangle of smooth cardboard and the hard cask of lighter fluid and drags them into the shape of her palm. She pulls out a cigarette, ignites the end of it, and draws in a long sucking breath teeming with poison and nerve-soothing white smoke. Overhead, she looks up, and the sky is peeling in places. It's growing, the old figure of night too small, and it sheds the nocturnal skin like an unwinding celestial serpent. New starless flesh appears, and it's only a tinge of gray-blue color, nearing birth, until the cries of the morning break free, and for a moment humanity can glimpse heaven in the wreathed gold flame that leaps forward from the womb of night into the sky.

With morning broken, and the night forgotten, she can breathe a little easier. Especially with the cigarette poised in her hand.

Her head snaps, eyes bright and wide and overwhelmed by the whites of them. Behind her, she thinks she heard something, a rattling of the tin garbage cans, and at first she thought it was only mice, maybe a slinking cat. But no sooner had she turned away from the origin of the sound, assured it is nothing, she's pulled back to it, the noise erupting again and shaking the foundations of pure, post-dawn silence.

"Hello?" She says, calling to the faceless clamor, the hand with the cigarette dropping to her side. Her eyes scan the entire alleyway, narrowing when she finds herself peering down at a large, shapeless shadow sheltered behind a mound of piled up trash. "You must think I'm stupid or something. I can _see _you."

No answer. Not even the slightest hint of reply.

She steps forward, but not too much, and her free hand slips into her purse for the pepper spray she's never careless enough to leave at home. "Why don't you come out? I've got a smoke. I'll share with you. Come on out, won't you? I won't bite. I won't hurt you."

Weapon in hand, she's armed and ready, and she ventures forth into the barricade of filth that rises up all around her like a fortress. A maze of shiny black trash bags lie in disarray all around her. Her fingers tighten over the spray, her hopes all dashed and lying bleeding at her feet - something has surely been through here, something bigger than a mouse, than a cat.

She pulls the spray out of her purse.

"Come on, now. I don't like games," she raises her shaking voice, keeping her line of vision on her surroundings, ears so sharply in tune with them that they twinge at the smallest disturbance.

She steps on something, something squashed and yielding to her weight. At first, she thinks it's only an escaped banana peel, but then the groan spills out of the refuse, and she pauses, taking her foot off the thing. Beneath it is the ice-white structure of a hand.

"_Shit," _she bites the word, spits out the cruel taste of it, hurrying to kneel down and crumble to her knees. "Hey. _Hey. _If you can hear me, I'm here to help, okay?"

She follows the trail of the hand that thins out into the sun-flecked length of ashen, bare arm. Releasing her grip over the softly curling fingers, she reaches for the trash bags, pulling them off the prone body. It's enough proof for her the someone is there, someone who needs fluids and an IV chock full of morphine fast, and she turns a little toward the side door leading into the back of the hospital, bracing herself against the mild push of gravity weighing down on her.

"Hey!" She screams at the door, the surface of it crawling with green and rust, but otherwise untouched and remaining stubbornly closed. "We gotta live one out here!"

It's so fast, so rushed a movement, that she doesn't see it, doesn't even see it coming, and when she returns to the body, the figure buried beneath the garbage, she finds herself staring down the silver-blue length of an icicle_. _Not a gun, not a knife, _an icicle._ And it's protruding, she realizes with no small degree of horror,_ from the man's bunched up fist_.

"_Silence." _

She can't see his face. All she can rely on is cold and skin and the pain of her hair being slowly torn from its roots as the hand grips bunches of it tight, holding her head back, pinning her beneath his control. A voice is in her ear, twirling into the greasy air and mingling with the smell of the garbage all around them. It coils around her senses and softens her fear, if only a little, as the tremulous timbre of it breaks, sloping downward from its first inflection of force. She knows he can't fight back, too weakened by blood loss maybe - if only she could tell, take a look. If only she could find a way out of his - _it's -_ hold on her.

"Listen _carefully," _speaks the creature, the being, and staring at the _icicle _lying in hungry wait at the base of her throat, she knows it's not human. "I will not harm you. I wish not to. I only need your help."

"_I will_ -" she chokes out, and the sound is strangled, bound and made taut by the throat arched back and pinching her words. "I _will_ help you. If only you would let me go to them inside and-"

"_No." _It seethes into her ear, throttling her, tearing her head back even more until the tendons in her neck scream for mercy, and she does not struggle against it. Only prays. Only hopes.

"There's nothing I can do if you won't let me go," she explains.

"Oh, but there _is _something you can do," it counters. "You may _listen. _That is all I ask of you. Is it so difficult a task?"

She knows better than to answer such a question dipped in black, coiling malice.

"I require only your aid," it says, voice descending into a deathly thin whisper, like a wraith - an icy wraith. "_You_ will hide me. _You_ will care for my wounds in secret. Only you, you understand, it can only be you. No one must know…should they find me, they will destroy me. _You _are the only one who must know of my existence. No one else. Call for them again and I swear that I will deliver you unto the hands of your maker _myself."_

The last threat is a hiss. It sends shivers down her spine.

"Accept the terms and I shall let you go," it promises. "As I have said, I do not wish to harm you. I should not wish for you to _force_ my hand."

She blinks against the white blotches of pain that have begun to swim before her haze-stricken eyes. "Yes – yes, I accept."

The hand releases her. She's been let go.

* * *

><p>AN: I do apologize for how long it took for me to update this. However, it is here now - I hope you enjoy it. Everything that has happened here that has not been explained will be explained in the next chapter. Yes, my updates will be fairly short, but hopefully that will allow for more in between. Thank you for reading and for waiting so patiently.

Disclaimer - I don't own Loki. Only Naomi belongs to me.


	3. John Doe

His hand fists in her coat, loosening the buttons, making them strain against their tethers – so that they pop and dance across the floor under her couch. Soft, cold fingers. She can feel the ice of his blood through the cloth. It's him. The man with the noble features, who had been forgotten when he fell and they brought him in. The pain in his eyes is flooding her, coursing through her, a river of its own.

His grasp hardens until she feels as though she's being gripped by stone.

"Where am I?" He rasps. "Who am I?"

"You had no ID on you when you came in," she tells him, glad the icicle has melted away, lost and pooling somewhere in the cracks of the city streets. Afraid, though – she's still afraid of him. Of those hands and their intent, their capabilities. They are soft, white, as if they had never felt the sun, as if they have never felt the warmth of this world (however small and spread-thin that it's become).

"Give me a name. Any name." His voice is as hard as flint, and it's not a request – it's an order. Perhaps he is a king in his own mind. "I must have a name."

"They gave you the same name all the others get when they don't know who they are." The face slackens, no longer pulled tight over the hollow too-sharp bones hiding beneath. He is afraid too, as afraid as she is of him, but pride conceals it – hides it beneath the voice of flint and the eyes of steel. The hard exterior he wears, shell-like, impenetrable, keeps her at an arm's distance away from him - as much as the hand in her coat does.

"John Doe."

"John Doe." He repeats, tasting it, not as cold and otherworldly as the rest of him. Plain, simple – John Doe. Two syllables that tangle up in the complex layers of him, like flies in a web. It almost doesn't do him justice, but the contrast humanizes him, pulls him down here with mortals where he belongs. The first time he says it, whispers it through clenched teeth, she can breathe again because he's no longer the god-like figure made white and beautiful under the lights in that hospital. Anonymous, as if only legend knew his true name.

The ball of cloth pulled tight over her arm loosens. She takes his hand, and she feels the last spark of his pain as the needle sinks in – and the heroin dulls it until it's only a dream.

"It won't hurt anymore," she explains, as he blinks up at her and his eyes start to cloud. "Let it in and it'll make everything feel better."

His head falls back, sinking into the pillow, the emptiness in his head gathering until it blots out all thought, all consciousness, all feeling. He's swimming in it, wading through the thick gray web of the drugs that replace the darkness of failure with hope. And it's like a maze, one she's lost herself in so many times before, until it was not a place she could lose herself in anymore – she had drawn a map of all the uncharted places, and loneliness somehow crept in and found her as the last of her labyrinth faded away. She always wakes to grey light splintered across the floor, a reminder that this world is the only reality, and that everything else disintegrates as soon as the dawn touches them. Dreams stay in her head, where they are safe – where nothing, no one, can touch them but her.

It wouldn't last, but as she dug for a cigarette in the pocket of her coat – it would give her time to figure out things. What to do with him.

_What have I gotten myself into?_

.

.

.

Outside, it's raining again, but her hands are shaking and she's made a rule of not smoking in the house. The next tenants wouldn't like it, she'd decided that a long time ago. She imagines them often, what they'd be like. A family, new, shiny new. The mother would wear the kind of perfume that sticks to her skin and she'd wash it out of their bed sheets. Father, a tall broad-shouldered man who wore his hair slicked back and dimples in the small curve of his smile. There'd be a child too – blond, beautiful, a child of the sun. And there would never be loneliness gathering in the corners, like it did when she lived there. It would move on with her and leave the family in peace.

She lights a cigarette, shields it from the spray of the wind that carries the rain within it. It's growing dark just beyond the skyline of the city, where she can just see color forming like bruises in the sky. Umbrellas glisten as the rush past, and the people underneath remind her of turtles, too scared to poke their heads out where it's wet and cold.

_Cold_ – she remembers her coat, raising her arm to her eyes as she sucks in another breath of smoke. Wrinkles still carve through the fabric like tiny dark veins. The buttons on her sleeve have popped off, safe and still under her couch. It wouldn't be trouble to sew them back on.

The light is watery and fleeting, no color in the last beams of sun that cut through the clouds and sever the air. It catches on the ring on her finger, a blinding metallic flash that fades as quickly as it comes. She's almost forgotten it, how it used to feel heavy like a promise balanced on her hand. Now it feels so weightless and sore, and when she remembers, it echoes in her heart like a shallow rippling ache. It used to be so much worse. The kind of pain that even heroin couldn't drown, open to the air that pulled on the new wound and made it sing. It got so bad, so unbearable, that only forgetting that empty sagging weight on her finger would make the singing in her skin go away. Forgetting and heroin. Heroin was the key to forgetting, though the doctors at the hospital wouldn't agree.

She stabs her toe into the slim white stack of cigarette, kicking it out into the street. The rain still falls from the sky like shining dust. It's growing darker now, the dark chasing her inside where it fills the hallway.

Maybe she can do this. Maybe figuring it out isn't the answer, but following through.

Maybe it's all a matter of staying strong – and a couple of cigarettes in between.

.

.

.

She'd found him this morning, after she decided she couldn't sleep. That was a long time ago. Night has come, and the restless sound of it is like a dull hum outside her window. He's fallen asleep, a knot of long limbs and the white skin drawn over them like crepe paper. Bruises bite into his neck, his chest, his shoulders. Black and blue and purple that make the whiteness of his skin so ugly. That's the magic of it. It's so beautiful alone, untouched, like the first snow. But once the mud sets in and the oil and the piss – it's no longer beautiful. It's stained, ruined, blotched. It stinks because it's rotting as it melts down into the asphalt beneath it.

There's gaps in her memory now – how did this all happen? She remembers going outside for a smoke and for the quiet, standing there in the middle of a sea of garbage. Then the icicle in her face, his rough low voice in her ear as he made his demands. _You will help me, you alone, do you understand? _

Soon, the last of the drugs will wear off, and the pain will come back – it always does. Second nature kicks in, and she collects everything she'll need to clean the wounds so they won't fester on her couch. Gauze, sterilizing alcohol, a hot wet towel to draw the poison of rot out of the fragile nerves. She can't wash those bruises out, but they make her cringe when she looks at them. How ugly they are, how they mar his loveliness. They will have to stay until they dissolve on their own.

At his side, she's wringing the hot towel out into a bowl chipped with age and misuse. His eyes are open, drooping at the corners like the petals of snowdrops. They watch her move, squeeze out the water in the cloth, and bring it to the stitches in his side. He doesn't even grimace as she digs crusts of pus out of the black wiry stitches. The gloves on her hands protect her from the frostbite of his skin.

"I'm not sorry, for what I did," he tells her. "I know all too well the uselessness of begging. You have to use force to get what you need, much less what you want."

"That's not all true," she says, eyes fixed on her work. "There are selfless people in the world. You have to trust them, hope that they will come when you call."

"And I supposed you consider yourself one of them?"

"I like to, yes."

There are red bruises around his eyes, symptoms of a tired man who has fought too hard for too long. "Would you have come for me if I called?"

"Yes."

He snorts, the tendons in his neck rising and falling with the harshness of the sound. "No, you wouldn't have," he sneers. "I know you better than you know yourself."

"You're a little young to be so cynical."

"My age is irrelevant, even if I don't know it," he replies. "Age does not dictate wisdom. Experience does."

"And how do you know what you have experienced? You don't even remember who you are."

"Pain," he tells her. "I remember the pain, because it has become a part of me that I cannot forget. Whoever I was, whoever I might have been, I carry the pain of that old life with me into the next."

Her chest tightens. "Pain fades with time."

"Does it? You must have felt it intimately, to speak of such things as if you know them."

He's watching her too closely, those pale cold eyes that glisten faded green, like life gripped in snow. They shadow her every movement. Too close for comfort. But her walls are thin, the strength of them failing. No sleep, too much remembering – it's not good for someone who's only just begun to come to grips with healing.

"I know about pain as much as any other human being. We all feel it, at one time or another, and it does no good to dwell on a past that has caused it. Forgetting everything is the only way we can start over."

It seems so strange, to see something so beautiful and so regal and so proud in ruin. The hospital gown he's worn since he came in is tattered at the edges, the seams ripped and the skin underneath ripped even more. He is covered in a thin sheen of dirt, smelling of the garbage he had hid behind when she found him. There is no trace left of the creature he must have been. Though the pride remains, the arrogance, his strength has been sapped. And he doesn't remember, not like she does, where the pain came from – where _he _came from. He couldn't try to make peace with it, that ghost of his old life that shudders somewhere in the back of his head - where it is as black and bruised and cold as the rest of him.

"Don't you remember…any of it?"

"No," he says, clenching his teeth as she touches where it hurts. "And it is my hope that I will never have to remember again."

"You don't want to know who you are?"

"No."

"You want to be John Doe forever?"

He scowls. "Who?"

He must have been feverish and scared and not all there when that happened. When he gripped the sleeve of her coat, ripped the buttons from their stitches and scattered them across the floor (they'd dropped, heavy and hollow, scurrying under the couch for cover).

Or perhaps he's too proud to admit it, that he sought her comfort without trust, without his pride to soften the blow.

"It's – your name. John Doe."

"What a terribly plain moniker."

"It's better than being no one at all."

"It does not fit me…"

"Everyone, in some way, fits their name."

"I am not everyone."

He has grabbed her arm again, his eyes catching hers in their snare. "Do you honestly think I am?"

A stab of panic sinks through her, lodging painfully in her throat like a barb. "No."

He releases her, and she collects her things – hiding away in the kitchen where her guard slips and tears snag on the ends of her lashes. She turns on the water, and it laps at the edges of the sink, steam rising up into her face and blotting out the trails of tears on her cheeks. His blood runs red until the water thins it, a ribbon waving in the current.

She watches it until it disappears.

Circling down the drain, taking her courage with it.


End file.
